Sells, Michael Anthony (1998). The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia. Berkeley, California: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-92209-9.

Kokobobo, Ani (2007). "To Grieve or not to Grieve? The Unsteady Representation of Violence in Ivo Andrić's The Bridge on the Drina" (PDF). Journal of the North American Society for Serbian Studies. Bloomington, Indiana: Slavica Publishers. 21 (1): 69–86. ISSN 0742-3330. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2016-03-04. This book is way beyond my powers of reviewing, but I started reading it out of a sense of duty, to learn and understand more about the Balkan history and people, and then found myself completely enthralled with it. It's as if the author has found a way to assume a godlike role in depicting humanity - as if he had taken a brush and carefully swept out of their dusty corners the people of the town of Vi­­šegrad, as their turn comes to find their way in their corner of the world and in the march of time and wider events. They are brought forward from the shadows with compassion, but not pathos, and yet at the same time observed at a distance, as indicative of all humanity. The individuals he portrays have passed into legend or are fictional. Their turn in the limelight is brief, arduous, fraught with danger and often powerless - and how perfectly the last line of the book sums all this up! They are vividly brought to life in Ivo Andrič's eloquent and poetic exposition (and if even the translation is riveting, what must the original be like?) Finished. About a bridge, a beautiful bridge. Through this bridge one finds hope. But the book is also about the passage of time and the folly of man and the peoples and cultures of the Balkans. One percieves the smallness of man. There are no clear answers. Is it foolish to hope for a better future, and what is better? How does one judge progress? If there is kindness isn't life good? People are weak and mean and foolish, but at the same time they are kind and good and hard working. Both are true, and both will probably always be true. I believe the book says this. The bridge is built and it becomes a witness of history… And it becomes an inanimate partaker in all the events around it… And it mutely participates in lives of those who surround it… The common people remember and tell of what they are able to grasp and what they are able to transform into legend. Anything else passes them by without deeper trace, with the dumb indifference of nameless natural phenomena, which do not touch the imagination or remain in the memory. This hard and long building process was for them a foreign task undertaken at another's expense. Only when, as the fruit of this effort, the great bridge arose, men began to remember details and to embroider the creation of a real, skilfully built and lasting bridge with fabulous tales which they well knew how to weave and to remember.Ivo Andrić of Yugoslavia wrote novels, dealing with the history of the Balkans, and won the Nobel Prize of 1961 for literature.

The Bridge Over the Drina (sometimes translated to The Bridge on the Drina) is not really a novel, but a chronicle (as Andrić himself preferred to call it), or even closer to a short story collection with a single unifying theme—the bridge. It covers four centuries of Balkan history surrounding the bridge as this near-perfect (indeed, perhaps, perfect) structure in the middle of a storm. Andrić's writing comes across as being telling and cold for the most part, but also oddly sympathetic. The novel begins around the 16thC when the bridge is constructed in the small Bosnian town of Višegrad, and ends in 1914. The bridge itself, in reality, is called the Mehmed Paša Sokolović Bridge (pictured below). The novel is also, then, regarded as a "historical novel" or even a "non-fiction novel", into Capote territory. Georges Perec (whom I'm very fond of) said of it in Le Monde: I recommend looking at this bridge when you read the book. It is easy to find pictures on the web of this beautiful eleven-arched stone bridge. How what happened became myth is fascinating. The Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian and Turkish cultures and their respective religious constraints are described through the history fo this bridge, the bridge over the Drina at Visegrad in Bosnia. A great stone bridge built three centuries ago in the heart of the Balkans by a Grand Vezir of the Ottoman Empire dominates the setting of Ivo Andric's novel. Spanning generations, nationalities, and creeds, the bridge stands witness to the countless lives played out upon it: Radisav, the workman, who tries to hinder its construction and is impaled on its highest point; to the lovely Fata, who throws herself from its parapet to escape a loveless marriage; to Milan, the gambler, who risks everything in one last game on the bridge with the devil his opponent; to Fedun, the young soldier, who pays for a moment of spring forgetfulness with his life. War finally destroys the span, and with it the last descendant of that family to which the Grand Vezir confided the care of his pious bequest -- the bridge. Banac, Ivo (1984). The National Question in Yugoslavia: Origins, History, Politics. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. ISBN 978-0-8014-9493-2.

Wikipedia citation

Spanning generations, nationalities, and creeds, the bridge stands witness to the countless lives played out upon it: Radisav, the workman, who tries to hinder its construction and is impaled on its highest point; to the lovely Fata, who throws herself from its parapet to escape a loveless marriage; to Milan, the gambler, who risks everything in one last game on the bridge with the devil his opponent; to Fedun, the young soldier, who pays for a moment of spring forgetfulness with his life. War finally destroys the span, and with it the last descendant of that family to which the Grand Vezir confided the care of his pious bequest - the bridge. Patterson, Annabel (2014). The International Novel. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-21040-8. The novel's literary and historical significance was instrumental in persuading the Swedish Academy to award Andrić the Nobel Prize. [42] In his introduction to Andrić's acceptance speech, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences member Göran Liljestrand took note of the symbolic significance of the bridge and described Andrić as a unifying force. "Just as the bridge on the Drina brought East and West together," Liljestrand said, "so your work has acted as a link, combining the culture of your country with other parts of the planet." [43] Following Andrić's death in 1975, Slovene novelist Ivan Potrč wrote an obituary praising the Nobel Laureate. "Andrić did not merely write The Bridge on the Drina," Potrč remarked. "He built, is building and will continue to build bridges between our peoples and nationalities." [44]